How to get Sir Gawain and the Green Knight make to make sense to your students

I think Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is one of the toughest texts in British literature to sell to students. The verse is clunky and strange. The events are incomprehensible to modern readers. (Even in recognizing it as fantasy, the decapitation challenge still seems silly). The climax is, well, anti-climactic. (After all that, Gawain just gets a little cut?). The characters aren’t well-developed and it’s not exactly full of quotable quotes. On the surface, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight isn’t very accessible to high school students. But this is one of those texts that tends to stay put in British literature courses, so we have to find ways to get it to make sense.

As a new teacher, I tried out just about every Sir Gawain and the Green Knight resource that existed online during the late 2000s (including a cringeworthy skit activity and laughable tabloid article project). I lived, learned—and then developed my own approach. So here are my three main tips for making your Sir Gawain and the Green Knight unit resonate more:

1. Encourage a personal examination of the historical context

First off, I don’t recommend going in-depth about the legends of King Arthur or providing long history articles about feudalism. Few students will be interested in that information and it doesn’t overlap much with the story anyway. Over the years I learned to limit the historical information to a handful of slides that concisely explain what directly influenced the text: chivalry, the literary genre of chivalric romances, and the folkloric Green Man.

Green Man in Rochester Cathedral, Kent (photo by Akoliasnikoff, available under CC BY-SA 4.0 license)

I also created a “Do you have what it takes to be a knight?” intro activity, similar to just-for-fun personality tests you’d see in teen magazines or on BuzzFeed. It introduces the expectations for chivalry Gawain needs to meet and gives students an opportunity to identify the values they think relevant and irrelevant to their lives. I think it’s important to open the door to questioning the values emphasized in a text so students aren’t under the impression that it’s assigned for purposes of moral instruction.

Related resources:
Intro Activity: Do you have what it takes to be a knight?
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight Introductory Slides

2. Emphasize how it’s about proving oneself

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is all about a young person trying to measure up. Most students can relate that narrative to what they’re experiencing at the moment with academics, sports, clubs, or after-school jobs. Although Gawain’s trials with a shapeshifter and his associates might not seem all that close to home, you can highlight how these experiences give him a way to demonstrate how well he’s able to align with the code of the group he belongs to (which is something we all have to do to be productive members of society).

It clicked with students to analyze Gawain’s experience using two familiar methods of evaluation: a report card and a college application essay. For the report card worksheet, I considered the challenges Gawain faced and made up class titles based on them like “Chivalry 101” and “Social and Emotional Learning: Using Supernatural Foes to Your Advantage.” Students gave him a grade for each class, which they justified in the comment section with evidence from the text.

For the college essay assignment, students wrote from Gawain’s perspective about how his strengths and weaknesses surfaced when he faced a challenge. What I love about this assignment is that it leverages an old, kinda-weird text as an opportunity to practice a type of writing that’s pertinent to their lives. This pretend college application essay requires students to structure their work with a rubric and pre-writing graphic organizer, which they can adapt to the open-ended prompts they encounter during their real college application process.

Related resources:
Sir Gawain's Report Card
Sir Gawain's College Application Essay Writing Assignment

3. Frame it as a road trip story

Pretty much every high school student since the dawn of time has thrived on the opportunity to plan (or dream about) an adventure, whether it’s to a concert in a nearby city, Senior Week at the beach, a service trip to an underprivileged country, or a sightseeing tour of Europe. Young people want these experiences so they can gain independence and see new things—and also to feel transformed. In other words, when you take a trip as an adolescent, you grow up a bit.

Sir Gawain probably felt the same way, which is why he impulsively took up the Green Knight’s challenge. Because he’s a fictional character, we call his journey “a quest,” but it has the same essential elements as any teenage excursion without chaperones. As Thomas C. Foster puts it in How to Read Literature Like a Professor, a quest simply involves a quester, a place to go, a stated reason to go, challenges and trials en route, and a real reason for the journey (which is usually attaining self-knowledge of some sort).

Quests come in all shapes and sizes in real life, classic texts, and popular media, but they all lead to some kind of personal growth. Students get more engaged with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight when they see how it compares to other quest stories they’ve studied in school (like The Odyssey or Treasure Island) or know from movies (like Alice in Wonderland, Lord of the Rings, and many, many more!). Use the worksheet linked below to structure your discussion.

Related resource:
Analyzing Quest Stories Worksheet

In conclusion

If you’re wondering about how to make Sir Gawain and the Green Knight matter to your students, I can promise you that it won’t have anything to do with the intricacies of bob-and-wheel verse or how the story fits into the scope of Arthurian legend. Focus instead on the idea of Gawain’s need to learn what he’s capable of and the journey he needs to take to discover it.

P.S.

I recommend using an abridged version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The full text includes lots of religious references and details that won’t resonate with many students and only slow down the story. My honest opinion is that there’s not much to learn from the old-fashioned verse style of Gawain, so it’s fine to zip through the reading and spend more time on follow-up activities that explore the big ideas.

Be sure to check out my full unit bundle for Sir Gawain and the Green Knight! In addition to the resources linked in this post, it includes a pacing guide, reading questions, and a quiz. You’ll be all set for a well-rounded unit!